Applications may be installed onto a device, such as a smart phone or tablet computer system, to an account on a social network, or elsewhere. An application is a program that undergoes some form of installation before it can be run by the user. Installation may include physically adding it to a device on which it did not exist before, may include permitting it to obtain information about a user who did not grant such permission before, or both.
A certain amount of overhead may be required to install an application, and some users may be reluctant to perform such overhead. Some organizations such as Amazon.com allow a user to try an application for a cell phone or tablet computer system by running the application on their computer system and then forwarding the input and output between the server and the user's device. Such arrangement is suboptimal. What is needed is a system and method for allowing a user to experience an application before installing the application.